The Boatmen of Thessaloníki were an anarchistic group active in the Ottoman Empire in the years around 1900. They all were graduates from the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki, and launched a campaign of terror bombing, the so called Thessaloniki bombings of 1903. Their aim was to attract the attention of the Great Powers to Ottoman oppression in Macedonia and Eastern Thrace.

The group was a descendant of a founded in Geneve and developed in Sofia secret, anarchistic brotherhood called "Geneve group". Its activists were Michail Gerdjikov, Petar Mandjukov and Slavi Merdjanov. They were influenced from the anarcho-nationalism, which emerged in Europe, following the French Revolution, going back at least to Mikhail Bakunin and his involvement with the Pan-Slavic movement.

Later Merdjanov moved to the Bulgarian school in Salonika, where he worked as teacher and sparked some of the graduates from the school with this ideas. The group is found in published works with several names: "The boatmen of Thessaloniki", the "Crew", or the "Gemitzides", form of the Turkish word for "boatman". At their start, they had a different name, the "Troublemakers", gürültücü.

The name "boatmen" was due to "leaving behind the everyday life and the limits of law and sail with a boat in the free and wild seas of lawlessness." The first meetings of the group took part in 1898 with the purpose of forming a revolutionary terrorism group with the purpose of changing international public opinion in the matter of the freedom of Macedonia and Adrianople region through urging the social conscience of the oppressed. At first the anarchists started to make plans for bomb attack in Istanbul. In the summer of 1899, under the leadership of Slavi Merdjanov the group planned the assassination of the Sultan.

In December of the same year Merdjanov went to Istanbul, where he was connected from the secretary of Bulgarian Exarchate Dimitar Lyapov with local Armenian revolutionaries. Here they established that even with the help of the Armenians it was impossible to do it. So they planned to blow up the central offices of the Ottoman Bank in Salonika and Istanbul.

During 1900 Merdjanov arrived again in Istanbul to discuss with the Armenians the blowing and afterwards the terrorists started to work, digging a tunnels on both places. On the 18th of September, 1900 the Ottoman police apprehended a member of a group, who was carrying the explosives and later the whole group was arrested, including Kozakov, Merdjanov, Sokolov and Shatev. The core was hastily disbanded for security and only Pingov stayed in Thessaloníki for preparing future activity.

In 1901 the prisoners were deported το Bulgaria, after pressure from the Bulgarian government. The same year by skirmish with the Turks near Adrianople, Merdjanov together with the rest of small Bulgaro-Armenian band was killed. The Gemidzhii were ready for action again in 1902, but the seizure in Dedeagach (present day Alexandroupoli, in Greece) of dynamite, arranged by Supreme Macedonian Committee's leader Boris Sarafov, forced the group to abandon planned attacks in Adrianople, Veles, etc., and to restrict its activity.

Afterwards the members of the group went to Thessaloniki and continued to plan their new bombings. So on the 28 April 1903, member of the group, Pavel Shatev, used dynamite to blow up the French ship “Guadalquivir” which was leaving the Thessaloniki harbour. The bomber left the ship together with the other passengers, but was caught later by the Turkish police at the Skopie train station.

The same night, other group bombers: Dimitar Mechev, Iliya Trachkov, and Milan Arsov, struck the railway between Thessaloniki and Istanbul, causing damage to the locomotive and some of the cars of a passing train without wounding any passengers. The commencing signal for the large raid in Thessaloniki was given by Kostadin Kirkov who used explosives to shut off the electricity and water supply systems of the city. Jordan Popjordanov (Orceto) blew up the building of an Ottoman Bank office, under which the "gemidzhii" had previously dug a tunnel.

Milan Arsov threw bombs in the "Alhabra" Café. The same night, Kostadin Kirkov, Iliya Bogdanov and Vladimir Pingov detonated bombs in different parts of the city. Dimitar Mechev and Iliya Truchkov failed to blast the reservoir of a gas-producing plant.

They ware later killed in their quarters during a shoot-out with army and gendarmerie forces, against which Mechev and Trachkov used more than 60 bombs. Jordan Popjordanov was killed on April 17. On April 18, Kostadin Kirkov was also killed while trying to blow up a postal office.

Right before being caught, Cvetko Traikov, whose mission was to kill the local governor, killed himself by setting off a bomb and then sitting on it.

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